92: The Quiet Part, Loud (w/Sara Aniano and dappergander)
"Freedom Convoy" leader, Pat King, recently live-streamed his arrest on Facebook. His racist public incitements to violence belie claims that the convoy was non-partisan and peaceful. As with other conspiracy-based events, inner circle communications and public relations messaging prove to be contradictory. From RFK Jr appearing at a Far Right rally in Berlin and militias storming the US Capitol on Jan 6 to anti-vaxxers gathering at the Lincoln memorial and the Ottawa truckers tying up traffic and trade for over a month, QAnon appears everywhere. This week, Julian pilots solo to interview extremism experts Sara Aniano (who regularly reports on the alt-tech far-right cess-pool, Telegram) and dappergander about recent developments in the Q-adjacent conspiracy sphere, implications for the planned American convoy, and the coming midterm elections in America. They also discuss surviving the emotional toll of their research and offer advice for those trying to help themselves—or someone they love—escape.Show Notesdappergander on TwitterSara Aniano on TwitterGrid.News Reporting on Planned American Trucker ConvoyQ-Adjacent Convoy Protestor Arrested in Ottawa Cries Out “I’m Being “Stuck with a Vaccine” Convoy Leader Signs Off Her Speech at Occupation with WWG1WGA Rallying Cry
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Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
This is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
And they bring the same acerbic, yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
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Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm, or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
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Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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With police closing in on the trucker convoy occupation in Ottawa, Canada, one of its most vocal organizers and leaders, Pat King, live-streamed his arrest this past Friday on Facebook.
Other prominent leaders were also arrested.
I wasn't at all familiar with Pat King, but this supercut video published on Twitter gives a flavor of his views.
Trudeau, someone's going to make you catch a bullet one day.
To the rest of this government, someone's going to fucking do you's in.
You sons of bitches.
The only way that, and I'm going to say it out loud, the only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets.
And yeah, I said it.
That's the only way something's going to happen.
A massive revolution on a huge scale.
You might want to change your name to Ishmael, or drop a bunch of chains down the stairs and call yourself Chongqing Ching Chang.
Now you want to say, oh, the Indians' culture and everything.
The natives' culture is a disgrace.
It is, 100%.
Every person who was born here in Canada, in North America, you are indigenous.
People don't realize that.
If you were born of the land, you are indigenous of the land.
It's called depopulation of the Caucasian race, or the Anglo-Saxon.
And that's what the goal is, is to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race because they are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.
They are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.
They are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.
And we'll leave it at that because then we get into a whole different topic.
But, but now this year, this year alone, I think I'm going to have a big gathering at my house just for that.
And I'm going to film it.
You're right.
Cops will get shot.
Over the past two years, conspiracy-based protests with a specifically far-right leadership and inner circle have muddied the waters by putting out multi-purpose and often deliberately misleading layered messaging.
In the same way that 2020's hashtag Save the Children drew in dewy-eyed mommy bloggers and yoga teachers who followed pastel-cue influencers down rabbit holes littered with red pills, and in the same way that many in the crowd of thousands who gathered at the Lincoln Memorial just recently To listen to prominent anti-vax featured speakers at the Defeat the Mandates rally were in turn drawn in by appeals to unity and freedom, body sovereignty and choice.
So too, many seem to have been taken in by the story of the Freedom Convoy as being about peaceful protest against the tyranny of the elites.
Meanwhile, Sarah Aniano, who you'll hear in today's interview, has spent weeks following accounts on Telegram that openly display the far-right, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, QAnon-adjacent riddled discourse of those on the inside of the trucker movement.
Whether it's the neo-Nazi and Reichsburger hardcore who hosted RFK Jr.
in Berlin before enacting a spontaneous storming of Germany's parliament, or the tactically networked militia members maneuvering around the capital in body armor with bear spray and zip ties in DC on January 6th, Or the air horn blasting freedom convoy occupying Canada's parliament in Ottawa.
One through line is the contingent of QAnon believers and those who traffic in related conspiracy theories and fantastical prophecies about med beds, resurrected celebrities, surveillance nanotechnology, pseudoscience, COVID cures, prophetic numerology, aliens and magical sovereign prophetic numerology, aliens and magical sovereign incantations said to provide legal immunity and instant access to massive wealth.
Maniano has been reporting in the last week on the plans underway now for the American version of the Freedom Convoy said to be aiming to arrive in D.C. sometime between March 1st and 4th in time for Joe Biden's State of the Union address.
Convoy organizer Maureen Steele recently told Newsmax that truckers would be beginning in Barstow, California on February 23rd and then travel through Arizona and Texas on the way.
She also reassured Steve Bannon on his podcast that the money they're raising online to support the American convoy is all being handled by accountants and kept in a private bank.
So that's obviously an unfolding story.
At the moment, according to Aniano and others, like the investigative team at Grid.News, who I will link to in the show notes, it's a very disorganized group with ever-shifting plans and multiple posted maps showing conflicting routes around the country.
So time will tell if this coalesces into something substantial during the next month or so.
The true believers may live in a laughable cosplay alternate reality in which The Great Awakening will this time really, truly, finally return Trump to the White House in a populist fanfare of honking trucks and exhaust fumes, but their ability to bleed over into the real world is evidenced by the fact that the number of QAnon-inspired criminal events in 2021 doubled up on the combined total of the previous three years.
With the midterms looming stateside and the grassroots pregame in full swing to take over local government, attack school board and city council meetings, and flare up moral panics about critical race theory and gender politics, candidates sympathetic to these beliefs are poised to inhabit the strategic positions that were democracy's only bulwark against the big lie of Stop the Steal last year.
In the interview you're about to hear, I speak with Sarah Aniano and her colleague who goes by Dapper Gander online to avoid being personally targeted by extremists.
They've been swimming in these dark waters and reporting back over the last three years and are part of a small group of academics and journalists who deeply understand this cultural phenomenon.
Their message for us regarding the status of QAnon is that while it has lost some support, those who remain are perhaps more radical and dangerous, and our body politic is still deeply infected by the mutating ideology that jumped the rails from the Chan boards onto mainstream social media and invaded the wellness sphere in 2020.
There are new influential leaders in the QAnon-related community, as evidenced by Michael Protzman, you'll hear us refer to him as Negative48, and his followers who gathered around Dealey Plaza in Dallas toward the end of last year, expecting JFK Jr.
to come back from the dead at the site of his father's assassination.
Lady Diana to perhaps gaze down through the drapes from a hotel room window, and Prince and Michael Jackson to reveal from the stage that they've been disguised as the Rolling Stones all along and are not really dead.
And then there's the endless numerology sessions and rituals apparently involving drinking from a shared communion bowl that contained bleach.
Another emergent leader goes by Ghost Ezra, and as he'll hear, he's become overtly anti-Semitic as his popularity has exploded.
And there's a quite odd person, even by QAnon standards, named Ramana Didalo, who claims to be the rightful Queen of Canada.
I also ask Aniano and Gander about the human cost of being immersed in researching this material, how they enact self-care, and what their advice may be for anyone who's been sucked in on how to get out of conspiracism, or help others to get out, as well as resources for developing greater immunity to misinformation.
They are quite lovely and insightful people and I hope you enjoy our conversation.
One side note, Sarah Aniano was joining us from a basement office and her audio quality is a little tricky in patches.
Oh, and I will also link in the show notes to where you can find both she and Dapper Gander online to further explore their research and resources.
I'm joined today by two extremism researchers with a specialty in QAnon, Sarah Aniano and her colleague who goes by Dapper Gander online for anonymity. Sarah Aniano and her colleague who goes by Dapper Gander Welcome to Conspirituality, you two.
It's great to have you.
Thanks for making the time.
Thanks for having us.
Hi, thank you.
Perhaps we can start with a few sentences from each of you about what you do and how you got into it.
Sarah, how about you first?
Okay, yes.
Hi, I am Sarah.
If you know me from Twitter, you would know me by my handle, which is CoolFaceJane.
And I am a graduate student at Monmouth University, and I am studying conspiracy theories and social media, particularly rhetoric of the far right on social media.
And my thesis, which is nearly done, actually covers QAnon Instagram comments in the week leading up to the Capitol riots.
Great.
I go by Dapper Gander on all social and other medias, mostly to appease my parents who are terrified of someone harassing us.
But I think it's a reasonable precaution, but I'm getting kind of tired of it myself.
But I studied apocalyptic literature in school, specifically from the Renaissance forward, looking at different narratives of the end of the world.
but But I've always sort of had an interest in cults and that area simply because I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons during the Satanic Panic.
Big memories of the time was being 11 years old and I had just purchased a module or something from a comic book store and outside this woman handed me the infamous Dungeons and Dragons Chick tract that talked about how you could use the player's handbook to summon demons.
And I read it and my little 11 year old brain couldn't really frame In a larger sense, what was going on in the world, but I did know reading that tract, well, I know this isn't true.
Like, I know you can't do that with the Player's Handbook.
And it sort of started a lifelong interest as I've continued to be involved in games and gaming, which are a frequent target of various conspiracy theories.
And I started following QAnon out of when it was Pizzagate, or I mean, it was preceded by Pizzagate, which kind of traces itself almost in a straight line back to the Satanic Panic.
And so when it evolved into QAnon, I was already interested.
And I've been following it As my primary hobby since early 2018.
It's a fantastic origin story within an origin story.
I love it.
So, Sarah, in the aftermath of 2020, and then the HBO documentary, and then Trump losing the election, all of the ever-revised, you know, multiplying prophecies from QAnon failing, I think a lot of people who had taken it seriously as a cultish, far-right terrorist threat started to feel like it was really over.
Perhaps it was old news and in the end it was just about the friends we met along the way.
But I know that you and Marc-Andre Argentino, who we've talked about on the pod before, published a new piece, To the Contrary, on GNET in January.
So, based on this research, has QAnon really played itself out?
So, QAnon, as we knew it, has changed.
But it hasn't died.
It has evolved quite a bit.
And in the piece that Marc-André and I wrote, obviously we were trying to talk about what's happened in the year since January 6th.
But we also tried to explain how, while it may not have dissolved completely, QAnon has fractured into smaller sub-movements.
And those may be smaller in terms of quantity of followers perhaps but unfortunately when that happens that also makes them prone to more ardent beliefs and closer and more tight-knit uniform communities.
So what we discussed in the article includes groups such as you know the Dallas JFK negative 48 cult but which I know we'll talk about that later but also the phenomenon of platform migration which should also be considered I think in this new phase of QAnon and really every other conspiracy theory I would tend to agree.
For a long time there's been a real temptation to call QAnon a cult.
And you can debate over whether or not that is accurate, though I think it's safe to say it is cultic.
What's really happened since the mass Twitter purge, since the migration to Telegram and the fracturing of the community, what we are starting to see are things that Bear far more of a literal resemblance to cults.
Michael Protzman's Negative 48 group has virtually all the markers.
It now has a true charismatic leader.
They are now in real space.
They have occasionally talked about buying a compound.
So, I mean, Sarah's absolutely right.
The fracturing of the movement makes it look like less of a cultural phenomenon, but those smaller groups are Sort of distilled.
They're in some ways more dangerous to their members.
Maybe not to greater society, but to their members they are becoming more dangerous.
Yeah, it makes me wonder if there's a kind of phenomenon where there's a burning off of the people who were perhaps not as ardently invested or were sort of more on the outskirts.
And the people who are left, who are splintering into these groups, are the really hardcore people, you know, who have a particular kind of temperament.
Yeah, I mean the loyalists will stay.
Sometimes the loyalists are guilted into staying, which is a part of what we look at in social media rhetoric.
There's kind of this Festinger-esque, when prophecy fails, how do you keep people believing in the prophecy, and kind of, you know, threatening with Or threatening people with being ostracized, for example.
Or threatening people with losing this community that has meant so much to them.
That could be really traumatic.
And, you know, if they don't have a place to go back to in the outside world, they may very well stay.
By any means necessary.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Gander, you've talked about in some of your writing that I've read, you've used terms like crypto-anon and zombie-anon and metastasized QAnon to describe what you see in terms of perhaps some of this fracturing that we've mentioned so far.
Tell me more about that.
And I'm going to try not to ramble.
There's a precursor event that if you're not really, if you haven't been following QAnon for a while, I will touch on very quickly.
Q, as almost everyone kind of knows, or at least has picked up along the way, Q is no longer posting.
That figure has not posted since December of 2020.
And in the months leading up to that, there were a couple of very revolutionary posts that Q put out, and one of them in particular talked about Q directly instructing their followers to, in Q's words, deploy camouflage.
That is where the phrase, and again, if you've interacted with Q believers online, there's a high chance you've seen it, they will say something akin to, well there's Q and there are Anons, but there is no Q Anon, and the fact that you just used the word Q Anon means that you don't know anything.
And that is directly from these drops, where Q said, essentially, we're being portrayed in an extremely negative light, so...
We're no longer going to say QAnon.
There is no QAnon.
And there never has been.
There's just been Q and the Anons.
And that is a falsehood, absolutely.
If you look back at Q's Drops, Q referred to the movement as QAnon dozens of times.
But it was this shift in some ways seeing the way that the wind was blowing.
I mean, QAnon had phenomenal success at the beginning of 2020 when the lockdown came and their group Blue out of proportion with new recruits.
But by the end of the summer, that had started to flip around.
People were coming around to what was going on, and realizing that QAnon was sort of the central heart behind a lot of these other movements and theories and conspiracies.
And I think going into the actual election season, Q wanted to put some distance there.
And to a greater or lesser degree, that edict was received and followed.
So you saw a great many people, a huge number of Q promoters, just stop saying QAnon and fully sign on to There's Never Been a QAnon.
There's Just Q and Anons.
That has continued until these three groups that I've talked about where the crypto-anons, and this isn't a cryptocurrency thing, this is literally just anons who are fully deploying their camouflage.
still use the lingo, they talk about the storm, they talk about whatever, but they're not out there talking about Q. And this is what you see a lot in, for example, the Patriot Roundup or the Patriot Double Down.
Yes, the organizer still goes by the name QAnon John, but he organizes these events where he doesn't say Q. He doesn't say QAnon, he just has You know, for the Patriot Double Down, he had a pair of cards were part of the logo, and of course it's a 10 and a 7.
So it's 17, which is the 17th letter of the alphabet is Q, and the number of stars in the logo, there's 17 stars, and that's what I mean by sort of these crypto-anons.
They're dog whistling a lot.
They're still talking about what they're talking about, but they're doing it behind this sort of camouflage.
And that's contrasted to the sort of Zombienon faction, which is more or less made up of who used to be the biggest names in QAnon on Twitter.
Names like, you know, Incarnated Extraterrestrial, Jordan Sather, you know, the various incarnations of Peppy, or You know, Joe M, these very serious promoters who lost their following when they were all thrown off en masse from Twitter.
They're sort of, why I call them zombie anon is because they've formed groups, for example, on Telegram, where they still talk about Q openly every day, but you've, over the past year, I have watched their audience, while not dwindle, their audience is not growing.
I mean, the barrier of entry to join a Telegram channel is zero.
There is nothing stopping you from doing it.
So while certain channels grew, 300,000, 800,000 members, the quote-unquote official QAnon channel run by all these formerly huge influencers lagged behind and always has.
But they're continuing to keep the faith.
They are still posting about four-year-old drops and how it relates to the events of the day.
And then the largest group and the last group is Almost not QAnon anymore, and that's what I mean by sort of the metastasization of QAnon.
It's just that Q emerged from a huge, soupy ecosystem of conspiracies, and to that soup, QAnon has largely dissolved.
So you have tons and tons of people who now talk about Q prophecies and Q conspiracies without even necessarily connecting it to QAnon in the first place.
It's just become part of the conversation.
That's where, I mean, groups like the negative 48 group, Michael Protzman owes everything to QAnon.
But QAnon, Q never really did gematria.
That wasn't Q's thing.
He did numerology, certainly, and numerology was brought in by other believers.
But Michael Protzman doesn't really talk too much about Q. He's got his own thing, and his followers are following him.
They're not really even following Q. They're following him, or I suppose they're following JFK.
So those are the sort of the three big spheres that I see.
And QAnon itself, as Sarah rightly pointed out, what we used to call QAnon, is shrinking.
It is diminishing.
It's not the cultural movement that it was, but the impact that it's had on Sarah, one of the things that your GNET piece talks about is this triumvirate of influencers rising to the top in the last year or so, and we've already talked a little bit about
negative 48 or Michael Protzman, but the other two are the Queen of Canada and Ghost Ezra.
And these three seem, the impression I'm getting from you folks is that there's sort of vying for leadership as a kind of successor to Q.
Tell us more about that.
I think that one of the big things to note is that none of those three figures are nearly as, you know, anonymous in the real sense, the way Q was.
Some of them really aren't.
I mean, Ghost Ezra still kind of flies under the radar, but was revealed to be Robert Smart from Florida.
Shocking.
And then the leader of negative 48, you know, Michael Protzman.
He's obviously very open about who he is.
And then the Queen of Canada, whose name I'm still struggling to pronounce correctly.
Have we agreed that it's Romana I had to look it up.
In her very first video, she pronounces it herself, and she pronounces it deedle-oh.
Deedle-oh, wow, I was way off.
I'm saying it like it's Tony Soprano or something.
Deedle-oh.
Yeah, no, I did for weeks.
I actually had to go look it up.
It's more actually like an Irish name, it sounds like.
Yeah.
My new jersey is showing.
She's very open about her identity too.
She kind of wears it like a badge of honor.
So there's a lot of big differences because Q thrived on being a shadowy figure.
Open to interpretation, which really serves the fan fiction aspect of QAnon to begin with.
There was also, I mean, most people agree that Q was several people.
You know, we say, you know, them, them sometimes because we try to refer to them as multiple people.
So there's, again, there's a lot of big differences.
Also with QAnon, any in-person events were organized by the believers and not Q itself.
So that, that makes the others quite different.
But I will say that, I mean, just an hour ago, I think it was, I was listening to one of the Convoy live chats, and I've just tweeted about this so you might have seen it, but I entered in to a QAnon-centric conversation, where one woman was talking about who Q was.
She literally said, there's no such thing as QAnon, there's Q and there's Anons.
So following the playbook, And she also said, or somebody else responded to her, I should say, saying, well, Q must be good because the Democrats hate Q. So Q is still very much in the conversation.
I don't see a future where there's a new Q, where somebody's really filling the position, so to speak, but that doesn't make the threat of conspiracism in the other groups any less relevant today, I don't think.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you both about your impressions of the convoy slash occupation of Ottawa.
I've seen you tweeting quite a bit about it, Sarah.
It's a lot.
I mean, the iconography is there for those who want to recognize it.
But the thing that I thought was interesting about when I saw what Sarah was tweeting about just today was, again, if you think of these groups of They believe in Q but they've been told not to really talk about it publicly and some people follow that and some people don't.
I have noticed there was somewhat of an effort made to disconnect the convoy from sort of a direct lineage back to QAnon.
But now that they're in retreat to a large degree, now they feel like they're under threat.
I find it very interesting that they are now in what they consider to be private channels, openly talking about it, as opposed to sort of putting up this pretense that this is about freedom.
And, you know, no one should be forced to take a vaccine or lose their job.
And again, it reminded me a little bit of...
Save the Children in 2020, how here was this movement, oh no we're worried about the children and sex trafficking and you scrape away the surface and it's all cue people organizing and again talking in dog whistles and codes to one another because they love dog whistles and codes.
And so I think it's interesting that the Trucker Convoy, now that it is not on the upswing, but currently is right now feeling a little stalled, feeling a little like they're in a precarious position.
That mask comes off a little bit and now they're very comfortable simply talking about QAnon and Q.
Yeah, it's become an opportunity to introduce others to the topic as well.
Some people have not heard of this, or all the many tenets of QAnon to begin with, but I'm hearing people get quote-unquote red-pilled in real time, and I've been trying to explain to reporters and things like that why that's so worrisome.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I feel like this is a lesson we learn again and again with each passing month doing this podcast is that There are always going to be people to whom this is new.
And there are always going to be people who are vulnerable to, for example, in 2020, Save the Children, oh, let's all come together.
This is not about partisan politics.
This is about everyone caring about sex traffic children.
Same with the vaccines, right?
You can get into this kind of noble seeming notion of freedom of choice and how this transcends politics.
But then as you're saying, if you start going and looking at these back channels of communication, it's like, oh, there really is this underlying organizing principle instead of agendas, I guess.
For a long time, there has been, and I've talked about it quite a bit, there legitimately are these red-pilling guides that go around in QAnon spheres.
And one of the first sentences that they say is, everybody has a belief that is a little bit outside the mainstream.
Maybe they believe there's more to 9-11 than we've been told.
Maybe they are vaccine hesitant.
Maybe they don't believe the narrative on the moon landing, or JFK, or maybe they believe in Bigfoot.
That is your entry point.
That is where you're going to come at this person and The methods that are described in these guides are taken from MLM, they're taken from Scientology, they're taken from legitimately powerful sources.
And in the right hands, they are legitimately powerful.
The strategy that's outlined is get them to talk about the thing that they already believe, tell them they are smart, tell them that they know so much more about the subject than you do.
And trick them into teaching you about what they believe, and then pivot to a QAnon topic that you know really well.
Don't tell them you know it really well.
In fact, do the opposite.
Oh, I've heard this thing about how the reason that the Pope has red shoes is because they're from the skins of babies that have been sacrificed.
But I gotta say, I didn't understand any of it.
But you, you're so smart, I'll bet you can tell me what that's about.
Let's talk tomorrow and you can tell me what the red shoes are about.
Wow.
After you've done your own research.
After they do their own research.
It's like being a teacher.
And they are the teacher.
They're the teacher.
Right.
And again, the guide says, don't correct them.
If they get something wrong, don't correct them.
Just nod, keep telling them they're smart.
They are so much better at this than you are.
You tell them they are really helping you to understand this.
And while we're on the topic, what do you know about adrenochrome?
I don't really understand what adrenochrome is.
And it's that process.
And again, people will be ejected from that sales funnel.
There will be people who won't agree to come the next day and talk to you about adrenochrome, but the person who does has self-selected To remain in the funnel, and you just keep them going down until they are a QAnon believer.
In terms of the three people that we touched on, GhostEzra, Negative48, and I'm just going to call her the Queen of Canada for simplicity's sake.
Do they have sort of different strategies, different levels of impact?
Do you see any of them as being particularly more dangerous than the others?
My initial impression, Was that it's a little bit of like apples and oranges, I think.
I think that Ghost Ezra is, I guess, the hardest track.
He's not putting himself out in the open, so it's harder to trace back anything that he causes in terms of like an offline consequence.
But then if you hear about Negative 48 drinking out of this communal bowl of God knows what, Bleach?
Yeah, right.
Bleach.
Physical danger.
There's physical dangers coming from this, so I would be interested in Gander's read on that, because when you asked me that question, I'm really not sure.
I think that there's different dangers.
I think they all have their own unique danger.
That's exactly my reaction as well.
They're coming at this from three very different angles.
Ghost Ezra is a very traditional Accelerationist Red Pillar.
He spent eight months QQQ, QQQ, Conspiracy and Empiricy, Ancient Civilizations, QQQ, Jews?
QQQ, QQQ, Kazarian Mafia.
And then over time, it became more about Jews and more and more until he is recommending to 800,000 Telegram followers to check out the Nazi documentary Europa the Last Battle.
And he just comes right out.
And there's a screenshot that I saved from his Telegram chat where one of his followers was doing pushback.
Because some of them, to their credit, pushed back.
And, well, I don't understand this, Ghost Ezra.
You never used to talk about this.
And Ghost Ezra says, in a response on his own Telegram channel, you weren't ready for this.
He is an absolutely traditional red pillar 100%.
Negative 48 is very much coming from a traditional cult angle.
I am a prophet.
I can interpret the words of God and therefore his motivations and intentions and I will share them with you.
And then Romana, the Queen of Canada, is coming at it from sort of a bizarrely sovereign citizen kind of way.
The government is illegitimate.
That's what I was going to say, yeah.
The government is completely illegitimate.
I mean, it's amazing.
Her very first video Is literally just, hello, good morning, my name is Romana DiGiulio, I am the Queen of Canada.
I mean just a boom!
Like there is no intro, it's just, hi, let me introduce yourself, my name is Romana and I am your queen.
And I am hereby ordering the government of Canada to hand over control of the military to me.
Yeah.
And she hit the ground running.
So, they very much did.
They came from these three very different angles, which is why they're all kind of Q-inspired and Q-adjacent, but none of them... I would say the closest to being traditionally QAnon would be Ghost Ezra, because anti-Semitism was always part of QAnon.
Um, but the others have come at it from this very unique perspective, and they are.
They're absolutely different, dangerous in different ways.
Ghost Ezra isn't telling anybody to do anything in the physical world just yet.
He hasn't gotten people together.
Both Protzman and the Queen of Canada have.
They've gotten people to show up.
In the Queen of Canada's case, way more people than I thought would show up showed up with carrying her flags and wearing her t-shirts and helping her burn the Canadian flag.
I was expecting that there would be a dozen and there were several dozen.
So that frightened me a little bit.
And then negative 48 has just been a Kind of an ongoing tragedy to watch in a very traditionally cult-y way.
Yeah, I mean I followed, there was quite a lot going on a couple months ago with the stuff in Dallas.
And just all of the, like, the strange sort of ritual behavior, the obsession with gematria, the lining up in a straight line, don't look in any direction until I tell you, and then look over your shoulder and you'll see, you know, the pyramid revealed behind the book depository, where Leonardo DiCaprio has fired his shots, and then drinking from the chalice that includes, you know, some concoction that has bleach in it.
Very strange.
Sarah, in terms of national security, you say in your report that between 2016 and 2020 there were 49 cases of QAnon ideologically motivated criminality and then to my surprise in 2021 there were 93.
Now some of this of course is accounted for by the capital insurrection of people who were arrested as a result of being involved in that.
But you also argue that the way Trump harnessed the rage of the QAnon community is cause for grave concern during the coming midterms and the 2024 election.
Are you seeing signs of a continuing escalation in terms of this domestic terrorism threat?
And then I'm also curious, what you're noticing about What I think of as a kind of fifth column component where there are people increasingly on the inside or who are political candidates trying to get on the inside.
Well, that was what I was going to bring up, actually.
We know that there are a number of current politicians who have pushed QAnon and Q-adjacent theories in the past, Marjorie Taylor Greene being one of them.
Um, But if that's not worrisome enough, there's actually this running list from Media Matters with all the candidates running in 2022 who have a history of promoting QAnon narratives.
So I would imagine that with the midterms coming up, if there is any politically fueled far-right violence, it may mobilize then.
With the amount of misinfo and disinfo circulating today, that could occur at any time.
We've seen the butterfly sanctuary down in Texas get kind of infiltrated.
We've seen the butterfly sanctuary down in Texas get attacked from people who believe in child trafficking conspiracy theories.
That was just recently.
That was random.
So I think that it's hard to predict when these kind of isolated events will happen.
But I do think, having tracked the misinformation around the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey last November, that every single election will be subject to the same amount of ridicule and suspicion and conspiracism as there was in 2020.
And I think the more we see that, and of course the more Democratic candidates get elected, the more likely there is of some kind of violent pushback.
Yeah, it's like this is the new normal in terms of a level of just complete mistrust and misinformation about elections, which is incredibly alarming.
Yeah, and I'm curious too, you know, when you're talking about the convoy and the sort of the layers of communication, With regard to the convoy it was it it's something that actually really I get riled up about is that right now there's there's all of this school there's all of this activism around showing up at school board meetings and at city council meetings and and just being you're trying to each person trying to be crazier than the one before so that they can go viral on YouTube.
And so much of this comes from this conspiracist mindset that says, you know, all of the quarantine measures are effectively about imposing tyranny.
And all of the CRT stuff is about turning our kids into communists.
And any sort of gender stuff that we don't like is about, you know, grooming them in some really horrific way.
And you have people like James Lindsay, like putting this stuff out every day on social media.
And it's, all of that is so, it's so nuts in terms of The conspiracy that it proposes or that it makes claims about when really there is this other actual thing going on that we were talking about in terms of the strategies for red-pilling people.
How much of that stuff, like the CRT, the school board stuff, the city council stuff, do you think overlaps with the continuing QAnon or QAnon-adjacent community?
I think there's a definite overlap across all of them.
It's hard to say if every single school board soapbox parent believes explicitly in QAnon narratives.
The unique exception being perhaps Ron Watkins, who spoke recently at a school board meeting in Arizona.
The peak of just the strangest, worst timeline, but that's a whole other story.
That being said, I think one really big unifying factor across all these movements is paranoia.
So anti-mandate and anti-vax discourse fosters paranoia for children's safety, most of all.
Anti-CRT discourse, in particular, fosters paranoia for white children's safety.
And QAnon also fosters paranoia for children's safety, rooted kind of in the trafficking, save the children, blood sacrifice stuff.
Once you're paranoid about one of those, it's incredibly easy to be swept into the other.
So whether or not there's an overlap, I think that there definitely is an overlap.
I mean, I would say that you've got to remember that right up until election day, Q was explicitly promising that there was going to be victory, they were going to take the country back.
And then when Trump lost, it immediately fed two different narratives.
One, The whole, as we've mentioned, the whole, it was all, it's a whole fraudulent election.
But even that for some believers isn't going to be enough because Q had already said, Oh, don't worry.
We've got, the election is protected.
Like he had already guaranteed that nothing was going to go wrong.
And then it did.
So it left a lot of people sort of saying, well, since Q can't be wrong, Then either one of two things has happened.
Either Q deliberately lied to us, and there is a reason for that, or we did not fully understand what Q was saying, and the fault is ours, thinking that what Q was doing was promising That we were going to sweep the elections and take over both houses of Congress.
And that's where people like Ron Watkins and like Mike Flynn immediately sort of stepped up in the months following it and started saying, run for school board.
Run to be an election official.
Run to become part of the Republican apparatus so that you can prevent the next fraudulent election because you'll be there.
But what we're seeing reminds me a lot of sort of the creation science kind of idea back when there was that.
I mean, it's not the first time we've dealt with a concerted effort to take over school boards because You want to get your issues in front of the eyes of children but in this case particularly these people with massive audiences of QAnon believers really did pivot to this is what you should be doing.
You should be taking over your local elected positions.
You are going to be the storm.
Without you it's not going to happen and so Not only is there an overlap, but sort of a lot of fuel for the fire of this came directly out of QAnon communities.
I have a question for both of you that's sort of a little more specific to the territory that we often cover on the podcast, and I'm curious if over the last year You've noticed any sort of new developments in the crossover between wellness spaces and new age beliefs and then sort of the more biblical, you know, traditional QAnon kinds of beliefs and strategies.
And, you know, we've talked as well before about the whole mommy blogger and pastel Q kind of stuff.
Like, what's going on in terms of that bizarre marriage?
So for me personally I've been paying special attention to anti-vax narratives just because they are so disparate and they range widely on the scale of wackiness I guess I would say and it fits into all that wellness slash mommy blogger pastel queuing on stuff because I see a lot of people making connections between things like the COVID vaccine and 5G and they somehow tie that to explain what happened at the Travis Scott concert for
For example.
So it's really quite fascinating to observe how they can weave all sorts of narratives together that otherwise don't actually have anything to do with each other.
Yeah, that the shape of the stage was supposedly a satanic symbol, right?
Yes.
This was a planned sacrifice.
It was like a portal.
I think there was some kind of portal there too.
I don't really remember something about that.
From my point of view, I would say that Pastel QAnon was the final group of people to get sucked into the Q movement during the lockdown.
And as a result, they didn't spend a ton of time immersed in the movement before the movement started to fall apart.
While they were touched by all these different conspiracy groups, largely they retained their own core identity much more than a lot of other groups did.
And in fact, I would say they more successfully pollinated groups that were already inside QAnon to start thinking about what they believed, um, rather than have their new age beliefs become viewed through the Q lens. rather than have their new age beliefs become viewed through They, they viewed Q through their lens.
Yeah, good distinction.
And that's kind of what they... I mean, for example, the Starseed movement is big in in QAnon circles now I mean and it used to just be I mean that sort of fringe belief used to be ridiculed within Q communities and now it it it's central it's you can't
You can't afford to ridicule it because you will get half of your followers telling you that they believe in the Pleiadians and the Galactic Alliance.
Wow.
So this is the way that the New Ages really had an influence.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
There is currently some infighting, though, across some of the groups that I see, and I've kind of touched on this briefly when we spoke before, but that people who are super-duper biblical, you know, the word is gospel, are kind of calling the starseed types satanic and finding satanic symbols.
Yeah, they're not a big fan of someone saying that Jesus was an alien.
They are not big fans of that.
Yes.
So that's been, I think that once maybe Q stopped posting, then maybe that had something to do with it.
But in the absence of a leader, there is a lot of infighting and suspicion and doxing.
And it's along the Michael Flynn versus Lin Wood line.
And then it's also along the New Age versus, you know, strict Bible line.
It's been really interesting to watch.
It's kind of like a reality show, except it's terrible.
One of the things I would also say is that specifically about the sort of New Age, wellness, sort of spirit science kind of crowd, which, you know, one of the reasons it took so many people by surprise to see them join this movement is because they're sort of thought of as being loony left, not really loony right, which is where QAnon comes from.
So one of the things that's also really important to remember is that as 2021 progressed, The core of QAnon started, as they turned their attention to local elections and local boards and whatever, look at the things that started to really motivate them.
Look at the, we need to remove these books about LGBTQ folks from the library.
We need to do, and a lot of those new age types were never going to sign on to banning books.
That's not their jam.
So I think that's one of the reasons why the movement never fully integrated itself.
It always kind of started to pull back and while they spread their own ideas, as I said before, they spread their own ideas into QAnon much more successfully than QAnon spread their ideas into the New Age movement.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I have to ask you both, because I know that you're working on this, and it was sort of a new thing to me in the last couple weeks, but what is a medbed?
I miss medbeds.
I know it was only a couple weeks ago, but the convoy thing wasn't happening as much.
I miss writing about medbeds.
Oh, those were the salad days.
Right?
The yesteryear.
The question we were just talking about, about the sort of the New Age consciousness movement, very much does lead into the MedBed phenomenon because you are going to find figures particularly like David Wilcock, who is a – very much does lead into the MedBed phenomenon because you are going to find figures particularly like David Wilcock, who is a – he is at the center of – in the Venn diagram between sort of the
he was very much on that spear tip.
But, again, he in particular is someone who never started talking about Q. He is so central in that existing sphere But like I mentioned before, he's the sort of person that is spreading the belief in medbeds to QAnon.
He is not adopting QAnon's beliefs and bringing them to the Consciousness Expo outside of Los Angeles.
That's right.
He just knows they're vulnerable, yeah.
Yeah, and he's sort of one of the main figures claiming that there's going to be an imminent disclosure of the reality of... Yeah, we're just going on about 14 years now of imminent disclosure from David Wilcock.
Yeah, I remember he was a big proponent of the 2012, you know, hoax.
And I wrote a piece back then saying that people like David Wilcock, and Sounds True, by the way, who put out material by him and others who were talking about 2012 as this incredible, momentous, historical, spiritual moment should all apologize when nothing happens.
But yeah, but as to the specifics of medbeds, I'm gonna let Sarah take that one.
So let's, you know, let's get one thing clear.
Technically a medbed is nothing, because medbeds don't exist.
But the basic definition, in theory, that has taken a while for me to kind of perfect, I guess, is a med bed is a suppressed medical advancement that uses hidden technologies to both diagnose and cure physical ailments or diseases in record time.
There are roots in the secret space program.
There are roots in the science of Nikola Tesla.
They kind of have to do with each other.
There's three different kinds of med beds.
There's a holographic one, a re-atomizing one, and what was the other one?
Holographic?
Did I say that one already?
There were three types of med beds.
Once again, none of them exist, so it doesn't really matter.
I could say anything.
And in fact, many people in the community do say anything.
Put these paint cans filled with sand under your bed.
Yeah.
That's basically it.
So it's the idea that it's it's some kind of super secret high tech technology that that is like that is the cure for absolutely everything.
And if you have one, you don't have to worry about COVID and perhaps other sort of related tangential claims.
I guess the most relevant claim would be the Nessara-Gessara thing, which maybe, Andrew, you can explain that a little bit and how that ties in.
Sure.
I mean, like a lot of things, this is an ecosystem.
So MedBed technology, which is, you know, obviously this sort of science fiction technology has been around in fiction for a long time.
This isn't new.
This is a back-to-tank.
Um, but it really only entered the consciousness.
And I mean that both like the consciousness as in the consciousness expo and also the awareness of these conspiracy groups.
Yeah.
I keep thinking it's older than it actually is.
Um, when Sarah and I were really going back.
I can't find any specific mention of the technology as it is currently presented.
I can't find anything that predates the release of the film Elysium, in which the medbed is a central plot element.
And that's really common.
That was in 2013?
Yeah.
That's really common in this sort of secret technology that's about to be made known to the world, is they will Describe it and you'll look at when they first start talking about it and it is almost always a couple of years after a movie or television show showed that technology.
And what's interesting is the community who believe in it have, they approach that conundrum from two different angles.
On one side, if the technology is controlled by the bad guys, and I know you wanted to talk about Project Looking Glass, but this is an example of technology controlled by the bad guys.
The reason we see examples of time travel and space gate technology in movies is, and it's so weird but this is the best explanation, they believe that the forces of evil are required to show the public that these things exist Because it is part of their contract with evil.
It is the same reason they believe that the Illuminati puts on the Super Bowl halftime show every year.
Why is it filled with Illuminati symbols?
Because by displaying those symbols, the Illuminati gets power somehow, in a sort of quasi-spiritual sense.
So that's on one direction.
On the other direction is what they call soft disclosure.
And that is when the technology is controlled by the forces of good, and it's going to be released to us.
We're just not ready.
So there is soft disclosure to prepare humanity.
For when the technology is made available, otherwise there will be panic and whatever.
It's the people who used to say that all the shows about aliens are just getting us ready.
They're preparing us.
It's very thoughtful.
Right, yeah, for when they part the curtain and all the aliens step out onto the stage and take the podium next to the president.
Otherwise there might be panic.
So that's the other way that they come at that conundrum.
The reason these things all seem to exist in pop culture is either because the forces of evil are required to put them there or it's soft disclosure by the good guys.
Sarah, we wonder a lot on the podcast about solutions to misinformation and conspiracy rhetoric.
And this has really been in the spotlight, like, you know, front and center for the last few weeks with the Joe Rogan Spotify controversy.
One of the developments over the last year or so has been the migration from mainstream social media channels onto independent and staunchly right-wing old tech platforms that you've mentioned like Telegram and Rumble.
But you know, we talked to people like Imran Ahmed from the Center for Counseling Digital Hate, and he says the only solution is to de-platform people.
And yet when you de-platform people, now we're seeing what they do as a response to that.
Does it mean that de-platforming has backfired in your opinion?
Might this migration merely be seen as a kind of return to the unmoderated chans where a lot of this stuff started anyway before it jumped the rails?
How do you wrap your mind about this problem?
So I've been asking myself about this backfiring effect or possible backfiring effect for the past week or so Just because I've seen these convoy group chats get more and more fringe and extreme in their beliefs and a lot of them will say Oh, we had 250k on Facebook and they kicked us out.
So now we're here Is it good to get people out of those most visible platforms?
Yes but It's bad when other platforms are just as easily accessible but virtually unmoderated.
So I would argue that these newer alternative platforms are not like the Chamboards.
They're actually worse because they're still barely moderated but they're far more user-friendly.
And that opens the door to more demographics to see similar radicalizing content, right?
Grandma probably would have a really hard time using 4chan.
She can probably definitely use Telegram.
Yeah, it's so hard.
I mean, and, you know, the counter-argument is, you know, if we go even further afield, is that this is censorship, and this is also an expression of tyranny, and that of course, like, it further drags the Overton window, I think, in the wrong direction, and then it also gins up this kind of reactionary response to it that says, you know, this is further evidence that we really are being oppressed and silenced, right?
Yeah, well sometimes those censors will become content.
They will screenshot a message that they've gotten that they are being silenced, so to speak, and then they will reshare that and then it becomes content.
So the moderation is actually kind of folding in on itself as perhaps A radicalizing tactic?
I don't know.
I mean the only honest answer I can give to my idea for a solution is I don't know.
I would say that more human regulation on social media platforms would be welcome because, I mean, in my thesis, that involves rhetorical analysis, which picks up on hate speech and strategies that would never be detected by an automated algorithm.
Algorithms can't pick up on trolling as well.
They can't pick up on irony.
There needs to be a human component.
We need a more human approach to content moderation.
That is, I think, one actual proposal and wish on my future wish list in this weird timeline.
I want to switch gears a bit to your personal experiences as extremism researchers and sort of swimming in this stuff, as well as to strategies for the future.
And I've noticed that, Sarah, you tweet from time to time about the harassment and threats you receive and...
As well as the mental health impact of spending a lot of time tracking this stuff.
It's something I've seen you refer to as well, Gander.
How are you each doing personally with just that aspect of it?
I basically just have a low-grade panic attack at all times.
It's just always kind of there.
I've learned to deal with it a lot better.
I used to dig to find out what people were saying about me, but now I figure it's better perhaps not to know.
Remaining empathetic helps me cope with it as well.
That's probably the hardest part for most people.
But yeah, I think it's kind of a muscle that you have to exercise knowing that you're doing this in this space puts you at this inherent risk of that kind of criticism and trolling and harassment.
The more time you spend in the space, it's very easy to become overwhelmed or just simply depressed.
I mean, you know, if I'm about to say the following sentence out loud, I've been doing this for three years and nothing's gotten better.
You know, I've made a lot of good friends.
I feel like we've gotten a lot of information out there.
There is now a community where there was not one before.
I mean, when I was first When I first was on Twitter, it was, there were literally six or eight of us.
And there were 50,000, 60,000 QAnon believers.
And we would be going into these threads with debunks or whatever.
And the truth is, is that people like me, we're never really going to be the people who get people out of this movement.
Maybe we can help.
That's the hope.
But I don't think I've ever gotten someone out because I posted a debunk on Twitter of something because their thought process is very shut off to that.
So sometimes it's very easy to say, wow, you know, even though we've had what you can easily quantify as successes What has been the sum total of folks like me and Travis View and, you know, Will Sommer, writing and writing and writing and writing for three years.
We didn't stop it.
We didn't stop it from happening.
We didn't even slow it down.
When 2020 hit and the lockdowns came, we, the funny thing is, is that if you look at the winter before COVID hit, there is a, We were all feeling pretty good because for the first time we felt like we were actually really making progress.
The movement was slowing down, they weren't getting through the membership, and then COVID hit and suddenly half of America had A ton of free time and was undergoing a personal stress.
Two things that are absolutely key to getting sucked into conspiracy theories is being in some sort of emotional distress and having a lot of time.
And suddenly that describes so much of America.
As well as, I might add, high speed internet in your back pocket.
Yes, that helps.
Literally.
You wind up feeling, there's a high degree of burnout, particularly if Particularly if you have been immersed in the space for a long time, it can be easy to get burned out.
So I take breaks.
I do other things besides this.
Finding and joining even just little group chats where we just decompress and we're not always talking about The the conspiracy world is massively helpful and Anyone who's in that needs to Recognize that it is okay.
I mean I'm starting a little maudlin here the fact that the conspiracy world is going to kind of chug along the fact that There is not going to be a single essay I write or you write that destroys the conspiracy world.
That can also be seen.
You've got to take that and realize that that is also permission.
That if you need to step away for two weeks, you are not going to be at fault for what happens.
That's something that I see a lot of researchers get into.
Well, if I'm not doing this, then what happens?
And the fact is that we are all reaching people, but we are not reaching the people who are in these communities.
The only people who are going to do that are people who already have personal connections to the people inside.
A stranger isn't going to logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into.
So take breaks.
I give you my permission to take breaks.
You have to kind of keep an eye on your own head.
And your own safety.
Well, Sarah, do you want to bow out now?
We can maybe catch up a little bit later, unless you have sort of something queued up to say right now that you feel good ending on.
You know, I guess I think that your last question that you'd given us before is that, do we know people who've woken up from being deep in the fever dream of conspiracism?
I'm stealing your words.
I will say that my stepdad believes in some conspiracy theories and I literally can't talk to him about it because it just hurts too much.
He once said to me that maybe the information I'm coming up with is the misinformation.
And I was like, oh, so it's like that.
I struggle to see a future relationship between he and I that isn't just talking about surface-level bullshit.
You know, I can't talk about my work with some people because I don't know who believes what.
I don't know who's gonna see me as an evil Kami, Antifa, whatever.
And I think that that's Maybe the hardest part about doing this is kind of losing your innocence all over again and realizing that maybe the monsters under the bed are real sometimes.
That was not the uplifting note you were asking for, but that is what I've got.
So, even though Sarah didn't have the world's most uplifting thing on that particular topic, I do have a somewhat uplifting story about someone I know who did get out.
I have a... I mean, she's... I was gonna say a friend, and I mean, she is, but she's an internet friend, you know, as has become common.
But her name is Stephanie, and She is someone who was deep into conspiracy movements.
She believed in 9-11 truth and she believed in Sandy Hook and her story, and this is something that again I have seen echoed in others I have spoken to who have gotten out, her story is a little bit familiar.
She Started off just being curious about these in what she viewed as inconsistencies in media reports or what have you She ended up red-pelling herself getting deep into these conspiracy movements and then
In about, in 2017, I think, she was being visited by some of her, like, old friends who had come to see her and spend a week visiting with her, and like everybody in these conspiracy theories, you have to eventually proselytize, so Stephanie said,
Just sort of casually, oh, did you know X and Y and Z and her friend kind of pushed back until Stephanie brought up Sandy Hook?
And her friend got real quiet and her friend said, Stephanie, I work with one of the parents of Sandy Hook.
That happened.
Those kids died.
And suddenly she was face-to-face with someone whose opinion she valued, whose friendship she valued, who they had this connection, and here was someone saying, this thing that you've said is wrong, and I know it's wrong.
I've met these people.
And her whole view on Sandy Hook started to come apart.
And once that started to come apart, The process started to happen in reverse.
Well, if I'm wrong about this, if this source that I had trusted was telling me all of this about Sandy Hook, and that source, as it turns out, is lying to me, and that source also told me about this and this and this, and she It was a process.
I mean, this didn't happen over the course of a day, but she found herself getting out.
But it wouldn't really have been possible if she didn't have people on the outside.
I mean, and that's, again, I talk about QAnon being cultic, and that's a very familiar refrain with people in genuine cults.
If they If they are cut off from the outside world, if the cult successfully gets them to isolate, to cut off their friends, to cut off their families, to cut off all suppressive people, you can't, where are you gonna go?
Once you're out, where are you going to go?
And if you don't feel like you have anywhere to go, you stay in.
Even if you have doubts, you stay in.
So Stephanie having those friends, even though they were only visiting for a week, They were, whether they realized it or not, absolutely crucial in those first steps of her getting back out.
And she's a real sweetheart and she is very much a success story.
But the one note of caution I would put on that, and this is for anyone listening who has a family member or a loved one who is in, If they experience doubts, if they want to get out, try to be there for them.
It's so easy to say, and I mean as Sarah just did, I don't know if I'm, she says, I don't know if I'm gonna have a relationship with my stepdad.
And I totally understand that, particularly if it's for your own well-being.
You have to protect you.
But if you can be there for someone who is trying to get out, you And your love and your acceptance, not necessarily of whatever their beliefs are, but just of the fact that they are there.
That can be really critical.
And the cautionary tale would be that, please remember that someone who has been in is never all the way out.
Back to that red pill document, they're still going to have those beliefs that could be exploited.
And once you've trained your brain to be conspiratorial, it's extremely difficult and quite time-consuming to undo that training.
I mean, we're talking if you spent three years in this conspiracy movement, you're not going to stop seeing connections in a week.
You're going to be seeing connections for years and it will be an active fight.
Something that I see commonly is former believers will Get themselves out and then feel like they need to join the fight.
They need to get back in the trenches and get other people out.
And I agree that is a valuable role, but I see a lot of them make a tactical error, which is to put themselves in a position of Rather than talk about their own experiences and talk about how they got out and use themselves as something inspirational to others, some of them will stay in.
They're still spinning up a conspiracy, but it's an anti-conspiracy and it can still be very psychically harmful because they're still We're thinking about the world in the same process, but now, you know, QAnon is an evil in the world that is being perpetrated by these people that I now hate, as opposed to being people I used to love.
And that pendulum can be very dangerous, psychologically speaking.
So, if you or someone you love is a former believer, my real advice is to, if you want to stay in the disinfo and misinfo sphere, and you want to help and you want to fight, do so by telling your own story.
Don't try to figure out who's behind QAnon.
That is not a good way to spend your time.
You will drive yourself back into that place.
Because your brain is still going to be making those connections.
Your brain is still wired to look for conspiracies.
So spend your time keeping yourself healthy and helping others at the same time if you can.
There's so much there in what you're saying and the thing that really sticks with me is you keep coming back to This point that by getting immersed in that conspiracist world, people fundamentally change how their brains function.
They change a mindset in terms of actively seeking out meaningful patterns that are not really there, that will keep reinforcing and confirming a particular belief system.
I mean, if you don't think I noticed the number 17 everywhere, you'd be wrong, and I don't believe in it.
But I've been in the space so long and am so well-versed with what they do believe, you know, and a news story comes up and I go, huh, all right, they're going to turn that into a thing because X, Y, Z, Q drop number 795, you know, so I can only Even speaking as a non-believer, my brain has been trained to spot those signs and symbols.
So for someone who is a believer, it is a constant drumbeat of reinforcement.
Yeah, so you know the moves and the ways that this stuff is going to get spun, even though you don't believe in it, you can detect the things that will be sticky for those folks.
I mean usually I mean the thing is you got to remember a lot of what a lot of believers don't do deep serious decodes a lot of QAnon boils down to a handful of very
Thought-terminating cliche catchphrases, like, and the purpose of those, you know, if someone releases a video, whatever, and at the 17 second mark in the video, in the background, there is an American flag.
Okay, so QAnon people all go nuts.
Oh look, the flag at 17.
Q is a patriot.
Okay, so Let's assume, just for a second, let's assume that that is true.
What does that mean?
And the truth is it doesn't mean anything.
If Q was real and Q was making sure that that video showed an American flag at 17, the only purpose would be to say to the believer, I am real.
That's all it does.
It's just a little endorphin rush because you see Q's presence.
When someone gives a press conference and they are drinking out of a water bottle and all these Q people say, oh, watch the water, watch the water.
Q said, watch the water.
Okay, what does that mean?
Again, it means nothing But it is evidence of Q's presence.
So a lot of what they do is just these very almost Pavlovian responses to certain images, certain numbers, certain words, certain phrases that do not inform their belief or shape the narrative at all.
They are just tiny little endorphin rushes Because there, I sense that Q is here.
Wow, it's so religious in that sense, right?
Oh, extremely!
Extremely!
Wow, and so what you were saying before was if you're trying to get out or if you know people, if you're trying to have sort of a positive impact on people who are still caught up in this stuff, Be careful of not just trading in one way of pursuing that kind of patternicity with another or sort of staying hooked into some kind of cognitive process like that.
Instead, take care of yourself and show up in a way that is sincere and about sharing your own experience and about really connecting with people because that's probably better medicine.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, for example, my friend Stephanie.
Her story is a powerful story.
Hearing it is just, it makes me feel better about things.
It's made everyone who I've ever heard her talk to about this winds up feeling very good that her story is genuine and it is her true experience.
But I would never want Stephanie to turn around and say, okay, so now what I need to do is I need to figure out who did this to me.
Because that's already one step down a path towards making your own conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theory.
Because QAnon and theories like it, even if we entertain the idea that there is a single, let's say, there is a single evil person who wrote all of this stuff down and decided, I'm going to put this out into the world for whatever purpose.
You're never going to find that person.
QAnon coming from the chan boards basically means that unless someone deliberately saved some of that information, the context from which Q emerged is lost.
The conversation, because of the structure of the chan board.
I mean, yes, there are some archives, but many of the archives don't preserve every image.
Some of them Don't preserve the greater conversation going on.
I mean, you know, you can look at an archived version of every thread where Q actually posted.
But that doesn't tell you what the larger conversation on 8chan was that day.
Did Q say this thing because Q is a prophet?
Or did Q say this thing because there were four other threads that day on this topic and Q was weighing in?
Stripped of context, Q looks magical.
That's one of the reasons why so many of the promoters never, never sent people, intentionally sent people to the chan boards.
They would send them to the Q drop aggregate sites because, stripped of context, these are mysterious poems from which meaning can be derived.
And trying to drill down to Saying this person is responsible or this group of people is responsible.
is really, really, that's a very tough mystery to crack.
Because it is coming from a world, I mean, the Chanboards are a world where people are not genuine, first of all.
Just, you know, they're not.
They are boastful.
They think of themselves as being smarter than the other people in the room.
They have a very Hacksaw mentality, and so if you find evidence of someone saying, oh yeah, like, I totally know who Q is, okay, when they were saying that in March 2018, okay, find somebody who says that in September 2017 and I'll be really interested.
But someone saying four months after the first Q drop that they know who is involved, how much weight can a researcher really give that?
You don't know.
You can't back that up.
That's a claim from a site filled with notoriously unreliable people.
So it's hard.
So you wind up having to find good pieces of evidence and then Is there connective tissue between the two pieces of evidence?
And if there isn't, the responsible thing is to stop and admit that there is no connective tissue.
But someone who is conspiracy-minded doesn't stop at the lack of the connective tissue between the two pieces of evidence.
They will say, well that is so... I mean look how close I can get them.
I don't need the connective tissue.
It is clear to me that X leads to Y.
And that can be, again, that can just be really psychologically harmful to a person, because you're not actually out.
You've just rode the pendulum back in the other direction, but you're still in the conspiracy mindset.
Yeah.
I mean, I hear you saying, and this may be an oversimplification, but it's sort of like, when you realize that way of trying to find truth Is false.
Hang up the phone and do something else.
Make better use of your time and your life and your energy, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I quit smoking by vaping.
Okay?
But you're still vaping.
You're still doing the thing.
And yes, it might be less harmful.
And I'm, you know, I'm glad you're not still smoking.
And the people around you might be glad.
But you're not done.
You've just switched to something that is better for you, but is not good for you, and you're not really out.
You know, one thing I noticed, Gander, is that you tweeted about, and then in your Patreon, you created a follow-up post inviting ideas about how to provide resources for anyone personally impacted by this stuff.
Maybe we can close with that, with anything that's coming out of that inquiry for you.
Sure.
What largely resulted from... It started with just a couple of tweets where... As I said, when I was in school, I studied apocalyptic literature.
I am an English major by trade, so I know how to read and analyze persuasive writing.
I know how to critically read media.
And I forget sometimes that that is not a talent everyone has been shown how to utilize.
So I will say something sometimes on Twitter and the response from my followers will be, "Oh wow, I've never thought about it like that." And in my own head, I am surprised.
Like I'm like, "Oh, I thought I wasn't saying something useful.
I thought I was just doing a little throwaway like, hey, just remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene misspells the very last word in her tweet and therefore all we talk about is the very last word in her tweet.
It means that the rest of the tweet goes completely unchallenged and she got to say whatever she wanted.
Because every response and every quote to it is just, uh, it's your.
Okay, great.
But before she misspelled your, she accused someone of malfeasance or she misrepresented a statistic.
Anyway, that's how it started.
I made a tweet commenting on that and I had a whole lot of people say, wow, I've I always just sort of assumed she was dumb, and it's like, okay, well, she might be, but she also has an office staff.
She has people around her who maybe aren't dumb.
And the fact that it happens so frequently, I think you have to at least entertain the idea that if what happens every time is that she gets a lot of media attention about being called dumb, Her followers do not care if liberals call her dumb.
They do, however, care about the rest of the tweet.
So, is that a strategy?
I can't say it is every time, but it's certainly a strategy that seems to be working.
Anyway, that conversation with a bunch of my followers led to thinking about, are there things that we can talk about?
Are there concepts that might be very familiar in academia But that are really not commonly discussed, particularly on social media, but in the mainstream, that would be helpful in my audience and hopefully even a larger audience being able to take those lessons.
And the next time an op-ed is published saying, making such and such and such a claim, Can I help people to read that op-ed and say, okay, well, that's not what the op-ed is really saying.
The op-ed is making the claim, but that's not the goal of this piece of writing.
The goal of this piece of writing is to convince me to support this initiative or oppose this facet of government or society.
And so we wound up coming up with a list of I mean, it wound up being 20 or 30 different topics.
Everything from sort of how to lie with numbers.
That's something that's incredibly common during political campaigns.
And this isn't even, really, this isn't really left-wing, right-wing stuff.
Any political campaign in the world, for example, might say, we're a grassroots movement.
75% of our contributions are under $10.
Well, okay, but what you really just said is that out of every 10 donations, 7 of them are $10 and the last 3 are $20,000.
So, how do I... Yeah, you're a grassroots movement, sure, but are you going to be listening to those 3 $20,000 donors a little bit more?
than the seven $10 donors, because that campaign didn't say, you know, 75% of all the money we earned came from donations of $10.
They said 75% of the donations we received.
That's how people lie with numbers.
That's something that people need to be aware of that goes on all the time.
I don't like it when people on the left Share a news story that's easily debunked or a photo that's clearly been faked or you know are misled by the context of a screenshot the There's a thing going on right now.
That's truth.
Social is gonna cost $4 a week.
Well, no that screenshot is of a different app that's not Trump's truth.
Social truth.
Social is not charging $4.95 a week and you And I mean sort of the, when I say you, I mean the person who is sharing that meme is not doing anyone any favors by sharing it.
Yeah, in fact they're making their own side look bad ultimately, right?
So it sounds like some of what's come out of this is a list of things to be on the lookout for that have a kind of media and or social media literacy kind of heightening of awareness about how to spot what's really going on, yeah?
Yep, after consulting with a few people I decided not to use the word literacy.
What I'm just calling it is I'm calling it a series on media analysis.
The tentative title right now is there are going to be three series of articles that I'll be writing.
Great.
And though I will be writing them on my Patreon, they're not going to be subscriber-exclusive, they're going to be public stuff.
But it's going to be basically Media Analysis 101 talking about core concepts.
What is persuasive writing?
How does it work?
How do you ferret out what the actual argument is from a piece of rhetoric?
The line with numbers would fall under the sort of 101 category.
And then there's Media Analysis 201, and that would be sort of higher level concepts for people who are actively exposed to what I'm calling high-risk sources of information.
And then 301, Media Analysis 301, is targeted towards people who want to be a part of the disinfo or misinfo space and to actively participate in it.
And based on how the list of topics came down, it's, you know, it's For every six or seven articles in 101, there's probably two or three in 201, and there's one in 301.
Like, they're not going to be equal-sized things, and the 301 posts, I imagine, are going to wind up being a lot more involved.
But yeah, that's a project I'm excited to be working on, and I So those will start rolling out pretty soon.
They're not going to come out in any particular order.
It's not like I'm going to finish 101 and then do 201 and then do 301.
They'll come out when they come out.
And I keep wanting to say it's on a timeline of weeks, but as I said, this is still just my primary hobby.
I'm not making a living from this.
So it's really probably on a timeline of months.
But that's okay too.
I just, I want to be able to Leave something out there in my body of work that hopefully outlives my personal usefulness.
I mean, yeah, it's fun to laugh at QAnon and poke fun in their theories and debunk the ridiculous stuff, but as we've talked about a lot, the age of QAnon is coming to an end, but the effect of QAnon is going to be there forever.
